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I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

(michaels.world)
405 points blindgeek | 5 comments | 18 Nov 24 10:13 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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isodev ◴[18 Nov 24 14:57 UTC] No.42172859[source]▶
Why are captchas even a thing still? If folks want to scrape something or build an automation around something, then why not let them do it? They still have to respect the system they're logging in. Not to mention the privacy perk of not exposing your visitors to some captcha service with a dozen or more data subprocessors.
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1. dewey ◴[18 Nov 24 15:01 UTC] No.42172909[source]▶
Captchas are used for many things, and the reason they are still a thing is because they mostly work. Especially fingerprinting invisible captchas.

Try having a login form without a captcha and you'll realize you are capturing 100s of users every day that require you to send out a "please confirm your email address" email for each of them for no good reason.

> They still have to respect the system they're logging in.

Your trust in people is admirable, but in my experience running anything on the internet you'll realize that intentionally or not people will bombard your system until it falls over.

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2. isodev ◴[18 Nov 24 15:23 UTC] No.42173172[source]▶
I think folks forget that we can add many of the safeguards a captchas provide as part of whatever "form serving app" is needed without torturing our visitors to prove they can count bicycles.
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3. nraynaud ◴[18 Nov 24 15:37 UTC] No.42173341[source]▶
they don't work, robots have a higher speed and success rate than humans.
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4. dewey ◴[18 Nov 24 15:37 UTC] No.42173350[source]▶
I think the times of the "count bicycles" type of captcha are already counted just because of the bad user experience. Now everything is about fingerprinting, as paying to get captchas solved by humans or AI is already used everywhere if it's worth it.
5. dewey ◴[18 Nov 24 15:47 UTC] No.42173475[source]▶
Not everything is black and white. If it's cutting down 50% of the spam that does not have captcha solving robots because the effort is not worth it, that's already something.

There's a reason many site still have very basic captchas...it's good enough for their use case.